What started as a dream for 23-year-old Natalia quickly turned into a nightmare. ”I wanted to come to Greece, to go to the islands. They bought me and now I am doing this. They’ve told me that they’ll kill me if I try to escape,” she says, before rushing off towards the hotel where one of her sex-trade clients is waiting.
One would have assumed that the tumultuous chorus that this week accompanied the proposed formation of a human rights commission in Zimbabwe was a response to a presidential decree that any person found without a Zanu-PF membership card would be flogged at two-hourly intervals in a public square.
Western supermarket chains are surging into the fast-growing Chinese market. This week, Wal-Mart — the world’s biggest retailer — declared its intention to lead the charge, announcing that it will hire up to 150 000 new staff in China over the next five years. The plan is the most ambitious attempt yet to convert China to Western consumer culture — albeit with a local flavour.
It’s nice, isn’t it, when someone’s in the public eye for so long, and so variously, that you start to look upon them as a friend. I feel like that about Kate Moss — I know when she splits up with Babyshambles bad boy Pete Doherty and when she gets back together with him again; and I know where she hides her cocaine when she goes abroad.
A key survey on March 28 showed that business confidence in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, unexpectedly jumped to its highest level in 15 years in March. This boosted expectations that the European Central Bank will soon raise interest rates again.
The words Harvard and knee-jerk are not often seen in the same sentence, but when a rumoured shortlist of candidates to succeed outgoing president Larry Summers pops up and the majority of the names on it are women, there is good cause.
If you want an inexpensive weekend getaway less than two hours from Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Pilanesberg National Park in the North West offers a fantastic bush breakaway.
Little by little, Vasily Grossman seems to be working his way into the consciousness of the modern world. ”If his name already means something to you, and especially if you have read his novel Life and Fate, you may share my view that it is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century,” writes Martin Kettle.
Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, Dr Ali Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar above his left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he was seeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearing ski masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked his receptionist to the floor and when he emerged to investigate, ordered him to come with them.
Israelis convinced themselves this was to be the dull election, the one marked by a record low turnout and apathy. A people who complain they live in a land with too much history seemed in no mood to make some more. But make it they have. Last Tuesday they voted to reject once and for all the ideology that had dominated the state for more than three decades.